I’ve been Ziinga-d (what a fool!)

I had a spare few minutes last week and I followed an email to http://www.ziinga.com/uk/auctions. I’d never heard of penny auctions before and found myself fascinated by the site. Well wouldn’t you like to purchase something for £19.94 if the normal retail price was £600 or so? Pure greed on my part of course.

I duly registered for free and made my first bid for free – kind of them I thought. Then I discovered I had to purchase bids or win a bid package. So I entered a free bid for a block of 250 bids. I waited and waited for the time to run down. It reached one second and stopped – it stopped for ages. I thought I’d lost so I changed pages. Lo and behold up flashes a box saying I’d won and I could have the 250 bids for a fiver which included something like £1.50 administration fee. No mention was ever made of an administration fee when I registered. However, a fiver’s only a fiver and I paid up – with a credit card so that I don’t get caught.

This is when the fun starts. You are supposed to watch the countdown from two minutes to one second and place your bid. Once you’ve done so the time jumps back up to two minutes and counts down again. This is to give others a chance to bid again. Fair enough, I thought, until I played it at two o’clock in the morning (in my break on night shift).

Every item on the page showed one second to go, so I placed a couple of bids.

Nothing doing! Not a movement except it flashed up bid accepted and my bid count decreased accordingly. Twenty minutes later everything was still showing one second, nothing had moved and it was still taking my bids. Don’t forget I’d paid for them.

Guaranteed to make a fool out of me!

Still, I’ve learnt my lesson. I’ll use up the rest of my bids and let you know if anything materializes.

Dai and Blodwyn were engaged to be married. Dai was sent by his company to London on a two-week sales training course. The course was fine but the evenings were boring and by the second week Dai was fed up with sitting around in his hotel bedroom and went down to the bar for a few drinks where he met a couple of girls of the night, who enticed him into spending his money.
On returning home Dai’s conscience got the better of him and he broke down and confessed to Blodwyn that he had been unfaithful to her twice.
Blodwyn said she was glad Dai had been so honest – she too had to confess that she had been unfaithful twice whilst Dai had been away… once with the Tredegar Male Voice Choir and once with the Ebbw Vale Rugby and Football Club.

Bye for now!

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Published by philjoncook

I am married to Kath, a half-Irish blonde. We have three daughters and are also proud grandparents to three girls, four boys and great-grandparents of one absolutely smashing little girl. I am a henpecked novelist having had my trilogy "The Search" published. The first is "The Gateway" the second "Plague", and the third "I CANNOT KILL!". All are available on amazon.com, waterstones.com and at barnesandnoble.com. Until Warner Bros (or Peter Jackson, I don't mind!) buy them I spend my working life as a security guard for one of the largest food manufacturers in Europe. I've also started writing my fourth novel. Unfortunately six months ago I was diagnosed terminally ill with an estimate of 3 years left. As you can imgine this came as quite a shock and I am only now coming out of it.
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